Devil’s Haircut: Sam & Max Demo. Also, Hats

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The new season of Sam & Max has started with an episode whose title I can’t write, else my inner-12 year old takes over and the rest of the post is just me sniggering. To lure you in, there’s a playable demo available for the PC and the other PC. If you want to play more, you have to buy the whole season, which gets the episodes shipped to you monthly. But where to buy? Well, two options. Get it from Telltale’s shop and you get the collector’s edition DVD shipped to you when the season is complete. Buy it from Steam before April 23rd and you get some Team Fortress 2 items, as worn by our two models above. But if you pre-ordered it already from Telltale, you can unlock your hats here. So get it from Telltale, I guess. Anyway – the trailer for the first episode follows…

episode is easiest and shortest yet. having said that – the production values, pacing and staging of scenes is mindboggingly excellent and the dialogues hillarious as always. shame about the non-existing difficulty though since the game now feels more like an interactive animation movie than a puzzle game. still recommended, entertainment value very high though it could do with a little more mayhem and insanity on S&M’s part

You can still get the hats and guns from link to telltalegames.com even if you ordered from TTG rather than Steam. The Penal Zone’s actually rather good, it’s certainly more substantive than TTG’s previous Sam & Max efforts, and it’s far closer to the atmosphere of the original comics than any other Sam & Max game.

I’m faintly annoyed that my Press Pass Steam account has given me this new Sam and Max game but not the hats or items in TF2. I’m this close to emailing Valve’s support about it, but in all honesty I don’t think I should really ask for more free stuff from those guys.

Contrary to Toni’s comment above the episode is far from the shortest yet (I think it took me about 4-5 hours which is actually on the longer side of the scale for a Telltale episode), though he is right in saying it’s quite easy. I’d strongly recommend setting the hint setting to zero – you’re a smart person, with a lovely haircut, and you probably wont need them.

Though easy there are still a few nice “a-ha” moments when you discover how to use Max’s psychic powers to full effect. They also lend themselves to a lot of rather nice hidden gags. Overall it’s an enjoyable romp. It didn’t suffer from the copy pasted supporting cast of Tales of Monkey Island and as far as the Telltale games go I think I actually marginally prefer the more laugh out loud style of Sam and Max to the quiet chuckles induced by Monkey Island (though I think that overall Monkey Island will undoubtably remain the best overall story).

A promising start to the new ‘season’ and I’m looking forawrd to enjoying the rest of the episodes. All I ask for is a few more challenging puzzles.

It is wonderful, and just what I’ve come to expect from Valve, really. Here’s hoping they do it with other games. I especially liked the image, wot with the Heavy looking so gleeful about how awesome this all is.

I will admit that I bought it this week for the hats. I had originally been waiting until my backlog of games grew shorter (and waiting for an eventual sale) but the hats brought enough incentive to just get it now.

Oh hey, it’s out! I’ve not been keeping up with one of my email addresses. >.> I now have something new to play once I’m done checking out all the news for today, and thanks to Rick I now have Max hats for TF2 as well! Yay, thanks Rick!

As an old-school adventure fan, Sam and max: Season 2 was one of the best adventure games I’ve ever played. I liked it better than the original Hit the Road, even- the puzzles were certainly more logical.